Thank you for this! I thought Firefox for Android was slow - nope, uBlock was just doing too much.

Blame is not a finite resource. Just because 2 people are involved doesn’t mean they’re both 50% to blame — they can both be 100% at fault.

So to answer your question, the person is responsible for their onerous views. They chose to watch that trash and believe it. We can have compassion for them without absolving them of blame. At the same time, they are a victim of the people lying to them. So it’s fine to blame the person consuming the bullshit and the person producing the bullshit, and the fact that there are 2 people to blame doesn’t make either of them any less to blame.

True, but the original question was a hypothetical about the absurd consequences of ruling in their favor.

According to the arguments currently being made to protect Trump from prosecution. The premise of the question was “If presidential immunity is absolute.”

True, but it’s worth noting that this is an average and will vary wildly. Since I started tracking my annual returns have been 9.42%, 1.12%, 8.44%, 17.28%, -5.30%, 22.04%, 18.75%, 15.60%, -17.58%, and 18.11%. Which averages out to 7.75% — not far from the usual 7% figure.*

So for anyone just learning about investing, you’ll almost never have an “average” year. Each year will be all over the place. It’s only when you’ve been in the market for a long time that your returns will average out to something close to typical.

*I’m also ignoring an important distinction: IIRC the stock market averages close to 10% returns if you only look at dollar values. But when you account for the fact that inflation makes reach dollar worth less, on average returns are 7% in terms of real purchasing power. The returns I posted above are not inflation adjusted, but they include some bonds which don’t return as much as stocks. So it’s no surprise that my returns are on average less than 10%.

Voyager: https://vger.app/. Also available as an Android and iOS app.

In theory that gets around the legal issue but then you’re getting into practical issues: Trump is protected by the Secret Service so either it will be extremely difficult from a practical perspective, or you would have to get quite a few people to go along with the conspiracy. Again, this highlights what a terrible idea immunity is because the possibilities get horrifying really fast.

I am super duper NOT an expert but I believe the President can pardon crimes in DC, so that would get around the state court issue. Same for outside the US: I’m not sure states can punish crimes outside of the US. Even if they can, they may not have laws on the books to handle that sort of thing.

Theoretically, Biden could do it and not be prosecuted.

But if he ordered a member of the military to do it, they are required to refuse illegal orders. I don’t know the rules about illegal orders but I bet this would fall under that. At the same time, the President can pardon people convicted in military court so that’s not much of a deterrent.

Similarly if he ordered a civilian (say, CIA) to assassinate Trump, that person could be tried. But again, the President’s pardon power makes federal charges not much of a threat.

BUT — the President cannot grant pardons for convictions in state courts. So anyone involved would be in trouble if it happened in a US state. And if the Supreme Court did not make the President immune from state-level prosecution, Biden could be tried for being involved… but it seems unlikely that they would go for “the President is immune from federal prosecution but not state prosecution.”

Of course, all this show how insane and dangerous the idea of Presidential immunity is. It’s a terrible idea.

The men are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement!

Where I’m coming from: I’m just a random person on the internet, my opinion doesn’t really matter. So I’m willing to apply heuristics here that I would not apply if I were directly involved in the situation. If I were directly involved I would want to know more before rendering a judgment.

The heuristic I applied here was: this whole thing about “furries in schools” has come up repeatedly as a right-wing talking point and to my knowledge it has been a lie 100% of the time. So I was comfortable applying the heuristic of “if this has been a lie every other time it has come up, this time it is probably a lie.” As they say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so I would need something extraordinary to convince me that furries assaulting students with impunity is a thing that actually happened. Not impossible, there are enough humans on the earth that absolutely bonkers things happen all the time, but extraordinarily unlikely to be true.

A cursory search revealed a much more believable story: some students wore headbands possibly with ears on them to school, and other kids were assholes to them. Honestly the only surprising thing to me is how reasonable the administration was: they sent a letter reminding students that those headbands are not allowed by dress code but also reminding the other students that being terrible to your fellow students is not ok. I remember high school, this all sounds believable to me (except for the part where administration admonished the food-throwing bullies, that’s a little bit of a surprise to me).

I’ll take “things that never happened” for $1,000, Alex. Fortunately some actual journalists looked into it and this is all a lie: https://www.ksl.com/article/50985141/no-evidence-of-furries-in-nebo-school-district-despite-allegations-social-media-firestorm

After the administration had conversations with the students wearing the headbands — noting that they were a “little bit of a disruption” — the students stopped wearing them, Sorenson said.

The letter also addressed the food throwing targeted at the headband-wearing students, saying that a “written, verbal or a physical act that creates a hostile, threatening, humiliating, or abusive environment is not permitted.”

Presidents of the United States of America - Peaches. Who wouldn’t want to see a musical comedy with ninjas?

I read that as “the tool to report websites is broken.”

Mayonnaise sandwich. Or mayo squirted directly on a Ritz cracker.

See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.

I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there won’t be price swings — a lot could happen in those hours.

I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.

Sure, but what real-world problem does a trustless solve? I thought this was all very interesting years ago but now that we’ve had blockchain for years it seems it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.

We call this a “load-bearing could.” Or, “could is doing a lot of work in that sentence.” I mean, sure, it could, in the same sense that angry ticks could fire out of my nipples.

When AI starts telling us how to efficiently manufacture these new materials, now that would be revolutionary.

Yeah, it will help and it won’t. If you’re uploading through a typical cable internet connection, WiFi will almost never be the bottleneck. But if you’re streaming 4k in a part of your house that doesn’t have good coverage while other people use the same connection, it could make a difference.

I do a lot of streaming from my desktop to my TVs and I occasionally have bandwidth problems, so this could help that. And I have 300 up / 300 down fiber Internet, and in parts of my house I have problems getting anywhere close to that on WiFi. So WiFi 7 might help with those cases even if in the end your ISP is usually the bottleneck.

The approved mRNA vaccines went through the same approval process as any vaccine. And once approved, they are monitored for safety like any other vaccine. Between pre-approval testing and post-approval monitoring, we would have detected any issues. So the proof is in the pudding — lots of countries have approved them and none have found risks that are worse than the disease they protect against (currently only COVID but there are more mRNA vaccines in the works).

There’s also no reason to fear the way they work. Other vaccines introduce antigens (molecules that your body doesn’t like and produces antibodies to attack) in various ways — sometimes with a weakend virus, sometimes with a dead virus, sometimes just the antigens themselves. mRNA is just another way to introduce antigens so your body learns to fight them. For a little while your body follows the instructions in the mRNA to produce the antigens, and then your body learns to attack those antigens. It’s not all that different from the way other vaccines work. mRNA breaks down pretty quickly in your body so it’s not even in your system for very long, and there’s no mechanism in the body for mRNA to produce lasting changes. So it’s a lot like you got a cold: for a little while the cold makes your body produce molecules, then your body fights it all off, and then in the end there’s no permanent change except your body learned to fight off that particular antigen.